Virginia Woolf's Imaginary Museum of the Medieval in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’

Abstract

This article shows that the Middle Ages Virginia Woolf imagines in her 1906 short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ are influenced by the staging of the medieval in late-Victorian museums and reflects late-Victorian medievalism. From the perspective of material culture studies, Woolf's tale reflects the representation and fabrication of the medieval by the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum and shapes a similar narrative of the Middle Ages. Relying on Michel Foucault's definitions of ‘heterotopia’ as well as on Tony Bennett's analysis of Victorian museums, this article argues that Woolf's fictionalisation of the medieval evidences a new, complex temporality of knowledge and consciousness of the past which also defines late-Victorian curatorial philosophy and practices. It analyses each regime of that new temporality: first, the archaeological gaze and its contribution to the grand national narrative via the literary canon and, second, the theatrical gaze, with its focus on spectacularly displayed artefacts, that partakes of an image's mystique. In temporal terms, this results in a tension between the tangible remains of a past clearly separated from the present and the mystical fusion of past and present reinscribing Woolf's poetics of the moment within a sense of history.